A blog about weather, climate, and science. Occasionally, we'll post on other topics of interest.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Giant Hail on Radar

Here is what very large hail (two inches or more) looks like on radar.

The orange oval is the area where hail was likely falling at 5:17pm EDT. The two orange arrows indicate a non-meteorological echo known as a "hail spike." There is no precipitation falling along the spike. It is an artifact of the way the radar senses the hail. Unfortunately, the Roanoke WSR-88D does not have dual-polarization as yet so I cannot show you what the hail would look like on that type of display.

There is also a tornado warning (purple polygon) in effect on that storm.

Update: Saturday, 9:15pm CDT. Via Facebook here is a photo of some of the hail from this storm.